Google has blamed a “power event” at its London cloud data centre for an outage that disrupted banks, delivery firms and court video links across the UK, with services now recovering.
The disruption began at about 07:00 BST on Tuesday in Google Cloud’s Europe-west2 region, its only UK cloud region, based in London.
Google reports issues with ‘multiple’ Cloud services
Google said multiple services experienced “elevated errors and intermittent network failures”.
Online bank Revolut reported a “service disruption affecting multiple services”, with customers reporting problems making card payments, transferring money and signing in. It stressed that “all our customers’ money and data are safe”.
Halifax said some customers were having difficulties with its app and website, while Lloyds said it was aware of issues with “certain online services”. HSBC also said it was aware some customers were struggling to access its services.
The outage also affected HM Courts and Tribunals Service’s Cloud Video Platform, which is used for remote hearings in England and Wales.
The Criminal Bar Association said prosecution and defence barristers could not proceed with some trials and hearings, hampering efforts to clear court backlogs.
Google points to power event
In an update on its Cloud status page, Google said: “Due to a power event we had suffered an outage within europe-west2-b zone. The power event is mitigated.”
The company said it was “seeing the recovery of services” and was prioritising the restoration of existing workloads. It expected partial recovery of infrastructure services within about 30 minutes, with remaining services restored afterwards.
Google has not yet explained exactly what caused the power event. It advised affected customers, where possible, to move workloads to another available zone or region.
Delivery firm DPD said it had connection issues affecting its website, though it later said these had been resolved. Downdetector also recorded reports of problems involving Royal Mail, Rightmove and other sites, although it is not confirmed that every reported issue was linked to Google Cloud.
Budgeting app Emma said it had been down since 7am because of the Google Cloud outage, adding that it was “a technical outage, not a security issue”.
Google Cloud provides the underlying computing, storage and networking infrastructure used by many businesses and public services
Google Cloud provides the underlying computing, storage and networking infrastructure used by many businesses and public services. Because several organisations rely on the same London-based cloud region, a fault there can have a knock-on effect across services that appear unrelated to customers.
It is not the first time Google’s Europe-west2 data centres have caused major disruption: a July 2022 outage was attributed to a cooling failure during a heatwave. Google has not suggested that cooling was behind Tuesday’s incident.
